The goals of this tutorial are to inform and guide researchers in the practice of netnographic research. The half-day session introduces netnography and explains its recent evolution in the systems science field with an emphasis on specific hands-on methods for conducting this style of research and examples of its successful completion. The tutorial will provide participants with a solid introduction to the operations, opportunities, and challenges of netnography within the broader context of qualitative social media research. The session will be led by a researcher who authored five books covering the method and its applications.
At the end of this hands-on half-day session (bring your own computers and social media research topics!), participants will be able to:
- Discern and develop appropriate topics and questions for netnographic research;
- Articulate the main movements and procedures that distinguish a netnography project from other approaches;
- Discuss the ethical challenges in netnography and how they can be addressed;
- Describe the conceptual bases of new and emerging forms of netnography such as the auto-netnography, transformative netnography, and more-than-human netnography;
- Explain the opportunities and challenges of incorporating AI and natural language processing procedures into netnographic research.
SWT Leaders:
Robert Kozinets (Primary Contact)
University of Southern California
rkozinets@usc.edu
Ulrike Gretzel
Netnografica LLC
gretzel@usc.edu